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Sunday, November 14, 2010

Tommy's Take on The Ice Palace

The Ice Palace, like previous ICONS adventures by Vigilance Press, assumes that you are playing in World War II, as Allied heroes. In fact, any of the previous team books can be used with no adjustments at all, both as PCs and NPCs.

The product is very light on art, which translates into being a lot of text crammed into the $2 package.

To be safe, there are spoilers after the jump:

Alright...tips are included to tweak the adventure up or down, depending on the PCs and how the whole thing is going.

The premise is that the PCs get tipped off to a secret Nazi society, who are working one a desperation attempt to crush the Allies, no matter what...and they are awfully close to succeeding.

I like these kinds of adventures, because it's not a bunch of vague hand-waving, nor is it a rigid, on the rails, scripted adventure. The PCs make their approach, and there are options on how to do that (including trying to stay under the German radar).

Guidelines are given depending on how the PCs approach the base (in Antarctica), whether by sea or air. For instance, the PCs can encounter an air patrol...and if they don't take it down quickly, they lose the element of surprise and the base is waiting on them...and that would be bad.

Sneaking into the base has a number of options, which will cover most of the eventualities...and yeah, the author has realized that a lot of guys are just going to go in full steam ahead.

Tips are laid out for using the Eugenics Brigade at various points inside the base, and they even toss in a helpful sidebar for the heroes getting captures and having to break out.

In the final battle, Nachtjager, an armored villain who reminds one just a bit of a B-List Nazi Dr. Doom, is about to launch atomic bombs. Nachtjager has werewolf soldiers and robotic minions to help him fend off the heroes, and again, if the heroes don't handle this fast enough the situation can get even hairier with the release of the atomic bombs...(though options are present for stopping the bombs after their release).

The last several pages of the book are devoted the vehicles referenced in the adventure, as well as the Fourth Reich's mooks, werewolf soldiers and Reichbots, with art sprinkled around in these sections, culminating in Nachtjager himself.

Writing an adventure to cover all eventualities isn't easy, but the author does a fine job of covering enough bases that if your PCs do go outside the bounds, it's a lot easier to adapt to...(and that is far more likely in a supers game than in most games).

Also, it is incredibly easy to drop the Fourth Reich into a modern game and add a "new" Eugenics Brigade as opposition, or other villains as needed. While I understand why all of these WWII adventures can't be used that way, it is a nice change of pace when they can be with minimal effort.